How Your Job Can Affect Your Insurance Premiums

You might expect an insurance company to consider your age and health when deciding whether or not to issue you an individual life or health insurance policy, but did you know they also put a lot of weight on whatyou do for a living? It makes sense that people with high-risk jobs are also more likely to suffer serious injuries or untimely death. So if you’re looking for cheap health insurance or a bargain on life insurance, take a look at these 2010 stats and facts from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and OSHA. You might want to consider changing jobs.

There were 4,547 fatal work-related injuries in the U.S. in 2010, or 3.5 per 100,000 full-time employees. That’s more than 87 deaths per week or 12 on-the-job deaths per day.

Every year 3.3 million American workers suffer a workplace injury from which they never recover.

A Liberty Mutual Insurance company report claims that injuries resulting in 6 or more days off work cost American employers over $53 billion a year just to cover worker comp costs.

The Top 10 Most Dangerous Occupations in America

If you’ve ever watched Deadliest Catch, you won’t be surprised to learn that fishermen and fishing-related workers routinely top the list of truly dangerous jobs. BLS data shows they average 116 deaths per 100,000 workers and suffered 29 fatalities in 2010. Adding insult to serious injury, their median hourly wage is one of the lowest.

Sorry, Monty Python. If you’re a lumberjack, you may not be okay. In fact, watch out for that tree. Loggers come in second on the BLS list, with 91.9 deaths per 100,000, and a total of 49 deaths in 2010. The mostcommon cause of injury and death, is coming into contact with trees and machinery.

If air travel is so safe, how come pilots and flight engineers come in third, with 70.6 deaths per 100,000?

You may not want to buy the farm when you learn that 300 farmers and ranchers bought the farm in 2010, due largely to machinery and transportation incidents.

Better to be a coal miner’s daughter than a coal miner. While safety conditions have greatly improved over the years, 43 coal miners lost their lives in 2010, (38.9 per 100,000).

When you’re a roofer, what goes up often comes down, hard. Of the 57 roofers who died in 2010, falling was the primary cause.

Reduce, reuse, recyclable but be careful. Twenty six refuse and recyclables collectors died in 2010, almost all of them from transportation incidents.

Six hundred eighty three truckers did not keep on trucking in 2010. The long hours, tight delivery deadlines and time on the road puts America’s truckers and delivery drivers in harm’s way.

In 2010, 133 police and sheriff’s patrol officers lost their lives in the line of duty, mostly from transportation-related accidents, followed by assault and acts of violence.

No shock here, electrical power-line installers and repairs round out the top 10 most deadly American occupations with 15.6 fatalities per 100,000 full-time workers.